Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship eBook

informed him that ’Quicksilver was a sure thing’.
Much correspondence passed without another meeting
being effected, and he lent her five pounds to pay
a debt of honour incurred through her husband’s
‘absurd confidence in Quicksilver’.
A week later this horsey husband of hers brought her
on to Brighton for the races there, and hither John
Lefolle flew. But her husband shadowed her, and
he could only lift his hat to her as they passed each
other on the Lawns. Sometimes he saw her sitting
pensively on a chair while her lord and thrasher perused
a pink sporting-paper. Such tantalizing proximity
raised their correspondence through the Hove Post Office
to fever heat. Life apart, they felt, was impossible,
and, removed from the sobering influences of his cap
and gown, John Lefolle dreamed of throwing everything
to the winds. His literary reputation had opened
out a new career. The Winifred lyrics alone had
brought in a tidy sum, and though he had expended
that and more on despatches of flowers and trifles
to her, yet he felt this extravagance would become
extinguished under daily companionship, and the poems
provoked by her charms would go far towards their
daily maintenance. Yes, he could throw up the
University. He would rescue her from this bully,
this gentleman bruiser. They would live openly
and nobly in the world’s eye. A poet was
not even expected to be conventional.

She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great
step. She raged against the world’s law,
the injustice by which a husband’s cruelty was
not sufficient ground for divorce. ’But
we finer souls must take the law into our own hands,’
she wrote. ’We must teach society that the
ethics of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century
of enlightenment.’ But somehow the actual
time and place of the elopement could never get itself
fixed. In September her husband dragged her to
Scotland, in October after the pheasants. When
the dramatic day was actually fixed, Winifred wrote
by the next post deferring it for a week. Even
the few actual preliminary meetings they planned for
Kensington Gardens or Hampstead Heath rarely came
off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of express
letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the
situation from hour to hour. Not that her passion
in any way abated, or her romantic resolution really
altered: it was only that her conception of time
and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.

But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations
with the adorable Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment
of dejection, penned the prose apophthegm, ‘It
is of no use trying to change a changeable person.’

V

But at last she astonished him by a sketch plan of
the elopement, so detailed, even to band-boxes and
the Paris night route via Dieppe, that no further
room for doubt was left in his intoxicated soul, and
he was actually further astonished when, just as he
was putting his hand-bag into the hansom, a telegram
was handed to him saying: ’Gone to Homburg.
Letter follows.’